POLYROCK: In Search of Playful Seriousness [1981]

Text by Stacy Mantel / FFanzeen, 1981

Introduction © Robert Barry Francos / FFanzeen, 2017

Images from the Internet

This interview was originally published in FFanzeen, issue #7, dated 1981. It was written and conducted by then-FFanzeen Managing Editor, Stacy Mantel.

To be honest, I wasn’t a fan of Polyrock at the time, as I found them too…esoteric. The whole synthesizer/techno-guitar thing was lost of me, but Stacy was a big fan, hence the interview. I heard the albums back then, but never saw them live. However, I do have an indirect tale about them:

In the early 1980s, after this article appeared, I applied for a job as an Editor at a technology-based magazine, and was granted an interview. When I got there, I found out that it was produced by Al Goldstein [d. 2013], and the interview was in Screw Magazine’s office. The person interviewing me was the brother of a member of Polyrock. He knew who I was because of this piece, and said he was not going to give me the job as a favor to me, because having Screw Publications on a resume was not a plus, and Al was a hard person for whom to work. He did, however, show me Goldstein’s office, which was just packed with memorabilia. He warned me not to touch anything because despite the chaos, Goldstein knew if anything was moved. I thank him for that, even now, because he was absolutely correct.

As for Polyrock proper, they released two major-label albums on RCA, produced by Philip Glass, and disbanded a year after this interview was published, in 1982. Looking back, I can appreciate some of their releases more, such as “Bucket Rider,” but even today, the snyth/modulated material is still is not where my interest lies. – RBF, 2017

Polyrock is not unique, but then again, they are. It depends upon what angle you care to listen to them from, and how contaminated your musical background is.

Everyone is talking about them. Some are nervous, some elated, some speechless – but they are reacting. Polyrock themselves are doing the least talking. They are modest experimenters, trying to be a little different. Polyrock is: Billy Robertson, guitar / vocals; Tommy Robertson, lead guitar / electronics / violin; Lenny Aaron, keyboards; Curt Cosentino, bass machine / synthesizer; Joseph Yannece, drums / percussion / vocals; and Catherine Oblansey, vocals / percussion.

I spoke with Billy Robertson at the Rock Lounge, Saturday, February 28 of this year. He is very amiable and neat, and smiles freely. When we spoke, a lot of sentences were left open where words could not express certain artistic aims; sensibilities. For coherence, I had to punctuate in my mind and on paper. Personally, they’re probably best left unclosed, because in that, there is more understanding.

FFanzeen: In The [Village] Voice, John Picarella compared your sound to geometric paintings a la Mondrian. But when I listen to your music, I don’t think of harsh, stark lines; I feel it’s more impressionistic and imageful. What do you feel?

Billy Robertson: Well, it’s really hard to make a comparison to paintings or that kind of art, but I see it more as impressionistic. It’s also an immediate type of thing too, because it isn’t painting. Although when you go into the studio, you make a record and it’s a piece, but when it’s written, it’s sort of an act of aggression. The thing is to capture a live moment; an experience.

FFanzeen: What do you mean by “act of aggression”?

Billy: It’s a weird word – it’s a performance. I don’t mean aggressive as a negative or positive act of aggression or anything like that, but putting out something immediate – something with a certain amount of intensity. And it’s a performance. To answer your question more specifically, it’s more impressionistic than mechanical.

FFanzeen: It’s felt mostly on “Your Dragging Feet.”

Billy: Oh, yeah.

FFanzeen: It’s very hypnotic, almost like a mantra, because it’s somewhat repetitive.

Billy: It’s packaged sort of in a form; it has levels. It’s a very pretty song to me.

FFanzeen: The systems approach and Philip Glass’ music deals with similar types of repetition and levels.

Billy: That song has a lot more of that mode or side of us than any other song, and I think it’s something we really want to do; even in short pieces, and not so much a trance-piece, but something that’s very subtle and right there with the instrumentals. Some of the new stuff would make this clearer to you. That type of writing style started, for me anyway, when I listened to Brian Eno; I heard it in the Beatles and John Lennon songs like “I Am the Walrus.” And that’s what I like about Philip. When I first heard him I appreciated the repetition. He was an influence, but he was more someone we liked and respected. We really didn’t see his music as being part of our music. I can really like jazz or other kinds of music, but I play my music, and it just has been coming more and more. I just identify with Philip so much. I think he identifies with us, but he knows that we’re making pop music and we’re in a different medium.

FFanzeen: How did that collaboration come about? Was it on your mind or –

Billy: It did enter my mind, but I didn’t see it as becoming a fact. I never thought it would become a fact because I didn’t picture Philip to be what he is, as open-minded and just as versatile because he listens to all kinds of things. He makes music that’s his music.

FFanzeen: Do you see Polyrock trying to bridge the gap between that kind of music and pop rock’n’roll?

Billy: Yeah, I think subconsciously. We’re trying to make a serious sort of musical type of music; not just an occasion. A dance band. That’s definitely on our minds and that is an aspect of our music. We really like John Cage and people like that, their aspect of music, but we also enjoy playing for people and dancing. So, we’re trying not to be that, as many writers said, “serious.”

FFanzeen: You’ve had a lot of problems with the critics about that aspect of being serious. Some have asked, “How can a pop band have that in their musical or personality makeup”?

Billy: Well, it’s in the personality. I think it’s a real special thing. That’s what keeps me going. I see it developing more and more for us. Sort of like bridging that gap. I wouldn’t say so much as the repetitious thing or the minimalistic thing because I don’t think Philip Glass is minimalist.

FFanzeen: I don’t think so either. Minimal is an Andy Warhol film.

Billy: “Grey Canvas” is minimal.

FFanzeen: When you’re putting music together, do you take concrete ideas and put one after the other, or do you use the kind of random approach that Eno takes with his systems pieces?

Billy: I think that when I write, I hear where it’s going. I can sit down with an acoustic guitar and play it. Well, it’s sort of a systems approach because I’m doing other people. I know what Lenny, as a keyboard player, will reflect into the song, and I know what Curt will. And I have an idea what my brother will do – he would definitely write his piece to it. But the others, even though I’m writing the melodies and injecting it to them, I can already see what they’re going to do. When I play with just an acoustic, I usually do the melodies with my voice, and it’s weird because you keep the melody in that part of your head and you write another melody, or you get someone to team up with you. There’s so many things we have to stay away from when we write, Tommy and I. We try not to keep Blues progressions out of it and funk feelings. We’re trying to start with these very sterile sort of holes and these melodies. Mechanically, that’s what we start with. But, we’re trying. I think we’re very emotional. I think we’re trying to inject that, so the emphasis is not on funk, because what’s soul? That isn’t soul. We can have soul in our music.

FFanzeen: Well, not having a bass is almost an anti-funk idea.

Billy: I’m not anti-funk. I mean, I love it. I find it more challenging not to work with, because it’s very easy to me. It’s because we have to stay away from these things. I think it’s inevitable that we’re going to grow into something where we wouldn’t have to sit around here and try to explain it. It’ll just be this type of music that came through a process; but it’s just a process of trying to strip down and get away from all these things that have been done; all these different modes. I mean, it’s been 25 years since rock came about and pop music still sounds the same way. You can make it different and change it into a different shape, but it’s still the same medium. And funk’s been around and African music has been around. Sometimes I think it’s a crazy thing to do [smiles] but if it can work and we can do it, good. It’s a romantic thing to do, laying yourself on the line; but it’s an experiment. We can fall flat on our faces, and we’ll just turn around and try it a different way. I don’t think that I’ll ever put together a band that’ll be accepted right away. I don’t think any of us would. We would try to do something that had space for growing.

FFanzeen: Groups like Visage and Spandau Ballet are working with computers that go beyond a synthesized bass; they’re computerizing a beat. People are saying you are electronic. Isn’t that a bit off-base?

Billy: I think that when using all synthesizer and rhythm generators, I see that sound as getting too homogenized, too packaged too quickly. I think that just working with guitars is more of an inside thing. I see that kind of electronic music as getting too sterile. Like Gary Numan. I liked his first record, but he got too sterile. The overall sound is too formulated.

FFanzeen: That’s what I meant, because those people are just programming in the entire thing and they’re called inhuman.

Billy: Well, that’s supposed to sound inhuman. I look back on this record and there are reservations, because the fact that we have a serious edge doesn’t give us room to be playful.

FFanzeen: What’s your definition of “serious”? The B-52s take themselves seriously.

Billy: Yeah, I can think that, too. I could ask myself, “What is the definition of ‘serious’?” And I think it’s totally absurd to think that way, but obviously there is a whole overall thing that is looked at as serious and something that’s looked at as playful. It’s not my definition though. If I really stop to think about it, it’s just a type of seriousness where you have an attitude of just like when you make a piece, it could be a serious piece, something that you’re really thinking about and really trying to make different, but also trying to be very pretty and aesthetic in a sense; something that’s not as playful, because if something’s not playful, what else can it be?

FFanzeen: You mentioned new material. What stage is that at now?

Billy: It’s at the stage where we have five or six songs down – not all at the performing stage, though. We’ve been working. We’ve been to London, and we’re going to Baltimore. When we get back, I just want to go back up to our house [in historic Woodstock], and get these things down. We want to get back into the studio to make another album the end of March.

FFanzeen: Will Philip Glass produce the next album?

Billy: I think he will. It all depends on what the circumstances are, who we’ll be working with. I see him as another member of the band with just a smaller part. He doesn’t produce it; he’s not about that. And that’s what I was talking about – one of the reservations about going into the studio again. Because we want somebody who’s going to be more sensitive to the rock’n’roll aspects of it.

FFanzeen: Let’s get some more background. Before Polyrock, you played with the Model Citizens for a while. What was Tommy doing?

Billy: This was the first time he became visual, and marketed what he does. Before that he made tapes and has a collection of his own tapes which may be marketed someday. He’s been working mostly on his own music. This is more of something which we’re trying to create. It’s not what we’re about. Right now, we have this thing and it’s a band. We’re using our personae. We’re using the look. It’s a lot more than just making music. I think if Tommy was to write music for himself, he would explore a lot more different things; more subtle things, and not be so accessible to himself. That’s what I’m into doing.

FFanzeen: Aren’t you afraid to explore so soon?

Billy: Yeah. It definitely takes some time, and it’s good for me. I don’t think it’s a compromise. I think that we’re going to get to the point where we’ll be ready to do it, and we’ll know better how to do it, and we’ll learn what directions we really like and want to go into. But I think there’s a different attitude. A more spread-out kind of experimenting. Next album, I’m going back to bass on a couple of tunes. On the first record, for some reason, I just wanted to get away from electric bass. Maybe now I can incorporate it into our sound, because we’re starting to get a good idea of what we’re doing.

FFanzeen: How long were you in the studio recording the album?

Billy: About a month and a half.

FFanzeen: Did you have anything to do with the ad campaign RCA launched, with “Polyvinyl, Polyrock of the Future”?

Billy: No, not at all. Did it seem like any of us did? I hope it’s clear to most people that we had nothing to do with it. We really hated it, but I’m not going to turn around and say “RCA stinks.” They just got a little away from us.

FFanzeen: Polyrock is the best name you could have come up with; it’s so descriptive.

Billy: We thought it had a nice sound, also.

FFanzeen: What about this “dance-trance” business? It’s applied to other groups too, such as the Bush Tetras, and you two bands couldn’t be further apart.

Billy: It’s obviously not an adequate description of the music. Even more general is the term “New Wave,” which really freaks me out because Blondie is supposed to be New Wave and even Talking Heads, because they made it through the same packaging, the same channels. So I just have to say when people ask me what kind of music we play, it’s “Polyrock.” We’re making it that and that’s what we called it.

PHILIP GLASS: A Touch of Class

Text by Dave Street
Interview © 1983 by FFanzeen
Images from the Internet

The following article on composer / musician Philip Glass was originally published in FFanzeen magazine, issue #11, in 1983. It was conducted by Dave Street.
Philip Glass is a modern musical phenomenon. At the same time he is sort of a modern Beethoven, an innovative classical composer who has challenged the traditional classical music world, and has simultaneously had an affect on contemporary rock’n’roll, as a producer and friend with many of the new music bands and musicians. He’s discussed music with the likes of David Bowie and Brian Eno, and produced LPs by two new pop bands, Polyrock and the Raybeats. Unlike any classical composer, he also frequents New York’s rock’n’roll club scene in search of new talent and ideas.

He has also attracted a lot of young people to classical music as well. At his recent brilliant sold-out concert at Carnegie Hall, there were even a few pop, punk, and New Wave musicians in the audience. His new album, Photographer, is one of the few classical LPs ever to hit the pop music charts. In this interview he talks about his music, rock’n’roll, and his life as an artist in America.

FFanzeen: What affect has pop music had on your own compositions?
Philip Glass: It’s generally something I’m very familiar with and live with all the time. My kids listen to it all the time. And often they’re listening to people who are friends of mine. One specific way it works, too, is that we’re often using the same technology of a recording studio. We’re working with the same kind of equipment that rock bands do. We use overdubbing and we use 24 tracks.

FF: Is that new in classical music?
Philip: It’s not done in classical music. The way classical music gets recorded is they think of a record as a sonic photograph. When they record a string quartet, it’s like taking a photograph of a string quartet. They record it as a performance. And from our point of view it’s like a very primitive way of working. When we do a record, we think of the record as a completely different thing form the performance, so we do it by doing just the basic tracks the way a rock band does. We’ll put on the keyboard tracks first, then we add the wind tracks and the vocal tracks. I can pretty definitely say that simply does not happen in classical music.

FF: So you’ve adapted the modern rock technology to your recordings?
Philip: Well, they grew up at the same time. In 1970, we began with an eight-track machine. Fifteen years ago, you didn’t have a 24-tradck machine. We have mastered the technology at the same time as other people were doing it. So I could talk to someone like Brian Eno about how he records this or that. Or talk to David Bowie about how he works in the studio.

FF: Has the traditional classical world held it against you for working the way you do?
Philip: They’ve held everything against me. The only thing they wouldn’t hold against me would be if I took a job teaching harmony at some jerk-water conservatory. But the main thing I’ve done that allies me more with pop music is that I actually play my music. I don’t just write music and send it out for other people to play. Except when someone’s doing a big opera, I’m there on stage playing the music.

FF: Aren’t your recordings shorter than most classical compositions as well; perhaps another influence of pop music?
Philip: Some are and some aren’t. Einstein on the Beach lasted five hours.

FF: But that was a spectacle unto itself.
Philip: Well, in some cases I’ve made shorter pieces with the hope that I’ll get on the radio a little bit more. And sometimes that has happened. But generally, pieces like Glass or the Photographer can be 20 minutes. A Mozart symphony is only about 18 minutes long.

FF: What kind of music did you listen to when you were growing up as a young boy?
Philip: My father had a record store. In fact, when my brother and I were only 15, my father put us in our own record store in East Baltimore. And we had our own rhythm and blues record store. So we listened to everything from “Ghost Riders in the Sky” to Elvis Presley. I was still working there when Presley came out. So from the point of view of someone who was selling records at the time, I was really seeing the birth of rock’n’roll.

FF: Did you play rock’n’roll yourself at first?
Philip: No, I never did. I’ve never played popular music. And the funny thing is I’m working more with it now than I ever did before. I think the thing to remember is that I come from a tradition of notated music. In other words, music that is written down. And that’s really a tradition. When you talk about music the question is: do you improvise the music or are you playing things that you’ve written? I’m a guy who plays things that I’ve written. Of course, this has made me helpful to some of my friends in the pop world who don’t’ really read and write music. Like when I’m working with the Raybeats or Polyrock, people who generally work in written-down material. I can write things for them. For example, if they decide to bring in voices to put on top of something I can write the voice parts down. Stuff like that. That’s a very useful skill that helps when I work in pop projects. Which is something I really like to do. First of all, it’s a lot of fun to work with pop bands, and secondly, I might make money on it. Money’s important.

FF: Does it take longer to achieve financial success in classical music than in rock’n’roll?
Philip: It takes never in classical music. The only way you can make money in classical music is by teaching. You don‘t make it from writing music. When I was a student at Julliard, my teacher was a very well known composer. He did a lot of music. I asked him how much money he made from his publishing. He looked at me and said, “Forget it. You’ll never make a living writing music. Get it out of your head right now.” And, of course, I never did. But most classical musicians don’t’ make a living out of it.

FF: Do you make money playing out?
Philip: Not so much playing out. I make it on commissions. Like an opera company asking me to write them an opera. I make it from what they call “mechanical rights” from record sales. Or from “synchronization rights.” For example, like in the new remake of the movie Breathless, they’re using some of my music in it. It’s the new Richard Gere movie. That’s called a “synchronization right’; when any time music is synchronized with an image in video or film, that synchronization. The “mechanical rights” mean any time it’s on record. There are called the “subsidiary rights” that go along with a pieced of music. The performance rights are very little. Actually, when I go on tour, I pay the band members and I pay myself the same, but I don’t actually make money from that. Those kinds of things are to sell records and establish a presence in the record world.

FF: Do you enjoy playing out?
Philip: I do. I enjoy the playing. And I enjoy being in different cities. I didn’t enjoy the things in-between, like the bus rides or the plane rides. I don’t like being in 14 different hotel rooms on 14 different nights. I don’t particularly like the Howard Johnsons, which are all the same. The eating and sleeping, which is most of what touring is about, is kind of boring. What I do like is going to a town where I haven’t been before, like Santa Fe, and seeing a theater packed with people and playing music for them.

FF: Did you have to suffer much before you started being able to support yourself as a musician?
Philip: I was about 30 when I formed the Philip Glass Ensemble. We called it PGE for short. I had gotten out of college and lived in Europe for a while, and I had won a lot of prizes as a student, so I actually didn’t have to work hard until I was 30, because I had won so many prizes from grants and stuff like that. Then I completely changed the way I wrote music to what is recognizable as wheat I do now. And then the grants stopped totally. Is started the PGE that time and I’d say it took about 10 to 12 years of doing other kinds of work to support myself while I was trying to make a career from writing music. I don’t consider that very long. Twelve years isn’t very long when you consider that what I was doing was virtually unprecedented. The other thing is, I don’t mind it very much.

FF: You didn’t mind having to work a day job?
Philip: I liked it. I was a plumber for three years and I enjoyed that.

FF: And you were still doing your music at the same time?
Philip: I always had the music, because I had to write music for my band. I wrote at night or during the days I didn’t work. I worked for a moving company about 10 days a month; the 5 days at the beginning of the month and the 5 days at the end of the month. That’s when people move their furniture. I worked real hard for about 10 or 12 days and then spent the rest of my time writing music. And then I drove a cab for about 5 years, and I liked that. The thing is, I never thought that I was suffering. If I thought I was suffering, I probably would’ve had a hard time. But I liked being out on the street, meeting people, driving my car around; New York is a circus.

FF: So it took you about 12 years before you were a self-supporting musician?
Philip: That’s right, but I don’t think that’s very long. The trick about all these jobs is that they were transient. My first job I was working for a friend of mine. He was a plumber. And he was sensitive to my being a performer. And if I had to leave town and tour for a month, they’d let me go. And with cab driving, I’d just go up to the dispatcher at the garage and say, “I’ve got to visit my mother in Toledo. I’ll be back in a month.” And they didn’t care. These are all transient jobs. They are jobs that have no future, no security, and therefore there’s a big turnover. You can drop in and drop out of a job. So what I did is that. I would go on tour, and usually I would lose money in those days. I’d come back from our tour about $2000 in dept, and I’d work until I paid off the debt.

FF: You were known and famous in Europe at this same time?
Philip: We were known in Europe very well. We had played in Europe from 1970 to 1976, and very little in America. People in Europe had no idea that I was going home and driving a cab. Because in Europe, they support their artists as if it’s a real sort of profession. A composer there would never consider working as a night porter or a salesman in a dress shop. They would get money from the government. There’s a different respect for the arts there. Not that it’s always good. Basically, what we like in this country is television and sports. Our main entertainment is television, sports and movies. When you get into being an artist, you’re dealing on the fringe of society. Except for a few stars who support themselves, there’s no system to support creative people here. But when I went to Europe, they had no idea what I was doing here to make ends meet. In the garage where I worked, it was filled with painters and writers. This is generally how people do it in America. And it’s not unusual. It’s not a particularly romantic thing to do. People make a big deal out of it, but if you want to be an artist or a musician in this country, it takes a certain amount of grit just to get through it. The best way to get through it is not to feel sorry for yourself because no one asked you to be an artist in the first place. No one said to me, “Hey, why don’t you become a musician?” To the contrary, everyone told me not to do it. So you only have yourself to blame. You do it because you want to.

FF: You’ve worked with pop groups like Polyrock and the Raybeats. How did you get involved with them?
Philip: First of all, it’s music that I listen to. I go to the clubs and hear it. In the early days, it was CBGBs and all those other places in the East Village. I was at tone of the first B-52’s concerts. That was about 4 or 5 years ago. I was standing in this bar and Brian Eno walked by and said, “There’s this really good band I want you to hear.” So I went and listened to them. The other thing is that when I was playing in Europe in the 1970s, I met a lot of guys who formed their own bands and became very well known. Like Tangerine Dream. I was playing in Berlin in 1971 when they were just getting started. So they knew me. A lot of people like Robert Fripp were all going to the Royal College of Art school. Like Bowie and Eno, as well. Like a lot of American musicians come out of art school. And so they started coming to see me and they wanted me to hear their work. That’s how it happened. Actually, they got me interested in what they were doing because they were interested in what I was doing. I just started forming social connections. In a way, at the beginning, it never occurred to me that I would work with a rock band.

FF: How did it happen?
Philip: RCA Records signed Polyrock and they needed a producer, and they asked the band who they wanted to work with and the said me. And the funny thing is that the lady at RCA Records, Nancy Jeffries, thought I had never heard of rock’n’roll. She thought I was only a classical composer. She said to me, "Do you go to rock clubs?” And I said, “I go all the time.” And I’ve known the Raybeats for a long time. Donny and Jody used to play with James Black, so and so I knew them from the Contortions. It was really fun going to see them at Max’s (Kansas City) because James would go into the audience and get his face smashed in. And the thing I liked was that the band kept playing even when he got dragged out. No matter what happened to him, they kept playing. And they sounded like a band. They left and formed the Raybeats, which has become one of the prime influential dance bands. They asked me to write a song for them and I had always wanted to. And at one point, it just happened.

FF: Are you constantly looking for new acts to work with?
Philip: I don’t have to look. They just pop up.

FF: You get lots of offers from the pop world?
Philip: Not that much. Just enough to keep me interested. I do about one or two things a year. Like I just got through working with Ray Manzarak. He was the piano player of the Doors. I just did a big record project with him. Just a few weeks ago, I worked with Paul Simon in the studio on something he wanted to work on. So some of my collaborators are older people from my generation. But there are younger bands around. I don’t go looking for bands. I’m busy writing operas and ballets and really don’t go looking for projects. When something comes up that interests me, and someone asks me to do it, changes are that I will. It’s also another financial thing; it’s partially how we make a living.

FF: It seems that rock’n’roll lyrics are mainly concerned with teenage problems and young romance. Does classical music intentionally try to reflect any such area of the human experience?
Philip: I wonder. Most of the music isn’t literal that way except for the theater pieces I do. And the theater pieces I’ve worked on were people like Einstein and Gandhi. What I’m interested in with these cases is the dramatic impact these people’s lives made on us. And sometimes there can be violence in it, too. And there can be apocalyptic visions, too, like the Einstein opera. And the Gandhi opera had a whole piece about civil disobedience. And, of course, that’s starting to surface again, directed toward the anti-nuke thing. But all those kinds of political experiences I went through during the Viet Nam days and the civil rights days.

FF: Were you politically active then?
Philip: I didn’t’ do much marching. I wasn’t that politically active. I was in a few marches. I found marches scary. I didn’t like being chased by cops. I didn’t want to get my head busted. I was always sympathetic to it. But I never put myself in a position where I could get my head cracked. The interesting thing is that by dealing with social issues in theater pieces, you’re saying what you have to say. But in terms of the emotion of it, there’s really not that big a difference between, say, a classical work like Rite of Spring and the music of the Sex Pistols. I think that the music is radically different, of course. Stravinsky and the Sex Pistols couldn’t be more different. But in other ways, what you’re dealing with, the range of human emotions, is available to all of us. The difference between long-haired composers and short-haired composers in not very different when it comes down to emotional content. The means of expression may be different, but the human experience has got to be pretty much the same.

FF: It’s rumored that you’ve worked with David Bowie.
Philip: I haven’t worked with him. I’m friends with him and we’ve talked about music from time to time. As a matter of act, we have a project coming up right now. It has to do with Bob Wilson’s new piece on civil wars. The fifth act is supposed to be the American Civil War and he’s asked David to play Abraham Lincoln. And David said if I write the music he’s going to ask Iggy Pop to write the words. David and I have talked about doing things in the past, but either he'd be in one place or I’d be in the other. He comes to my concerts and I’m trying to get a ticket to see his. We’ve known each other for a long time. When he appeared (on Broadway) in The Elephant Man in New York, I went to see it. And a couple of weeks later I was playing at the Peppermint Lounge and he walked over from Broadway. And this up and coming project could be our first real collaboration. But we’ve talked about doing a lot of things.

FF: Is it true that you invite strange people up to your house for dinner?
Philip: Oh, sure. But the kids also bring a lot of people around to the house. If they want to have someone over for dinner, I make the dinner. The kids are with me very other week. The weeks they’re with me tend to be fairly sociable evenings. The weeks they’re not with me I don’t go out at all. So I guess I’m kind of a Jekyll-and-Hyde person that way.

FF: Do you do most of your composing at home?
Philip: Yes. I have one piano in our apartment. I live in a tow-room apartment in the Lower East Side. Most people seem to think that musicians all live in nice, fancy lofts though.

FF: Especially since you’ve been going the Johnny Walker ads. People must think you ride around in limousines for fun.
Philip: I’d like to. And maybe someday I will. There isn’t a lot of money right now in the music business. But remember, I see a lot of records for a classical composer: 80,000 to 90,000 records. But by pop standards, it isn’t very much.

FF: Do you find more younger people coming to your concerts?
Philip: Yes. The funny thing is, as I get older, my audience gets younger. On the average, I’m probably 20 years older than the audience. But that wasn’t always true. When I first started playing, the people who came to my concerts were my friends. And generally, that’s what happens: you get an audience and the audience grows with you. I think about the people who liked Bob Dylan and bought his records before are the same people who like him and buy his records now. I remember playing Bobby Dylan for my kids when they were about 8 or 9, and their questions were, “Why does he sing so funny?” Most people get locked into their generation. But there have been successively younger generations that have gotten interested in my music. Now, when I do a concert, there are usually a lot of people there in their mid-20s. And I’m in my mid-40s.

FF: Would you like to play in a rock’n’roll band someday, if only for fun?
Philip: I think it would be fun. Maybe some time that will happen.

FF: What attracted you to classical music over the pop music you had access to at your record store?
Philip: I liked the classical music. My father liked classical music and that was the music we played at home. He didn’t like to bring pop records home. I was studying flute at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, and I started down the road of classical music. It’s what I was closest to, and that still remains to be true. But I have a very wide interest in all music. I’m not a snob about music, obviously, but my main outlet has always been classical.

FF: What are your favorite current pop bands?
Philip: I just heard this group, the Major Thinkers. I think they’re terrific. The Raybeats have always been favorites of mine.

FF: How do you meet new bands?
Philip: Friends of mine work in recording studios. And they recommend a new group that I should hear. And I still go to the clubs and hear new bands there.

FF: Have you listened to any of the hardcore music?
Philip: Not yet, but I guess I should.

FF: Do you have any closing words of advice for would-be musicians?
Philip: To the people who are interested in playing and writing music, I think that the craft and technique of it is something you can spend a lot of time at before acquiring it. The more you acquire, the easier it’s going to be to do the kind of work you want to do. If it’s an instrument you’re playing, really learn to play it. Those things take time. And there’s a certain period in your life when you have the time to do this, and that’s when you’re younger, because generally when you’re younger, you don’t have the pressures of family and financial pressures so much. So, it’s bets to master your craft when you’re young.